HISTORY LESSONS
The political successes of Long Island’s Levittown can help solve the affordable housing crisis today
NEW York’s Gov. Hochul was right for once when she turned to housing in her recent State of the State address. “The obscenely high costs of rent and mortgages are caused by the unconscionable shortage of housing in New York. It’s one of the forces driving people out of our state.” But it’s one thing to be right about the problem— and another to be right about the solution. At the groundbreaking last month for new mixed-income housing in Gowanus, Hochul continues to favor a mix of subsidies to provide New York with the housing it desperately needs — and that’s not the right solution. In reality, the state, and New York City, have proven it will never be able to subsidize its way out of the housing crunch. Gotham has more public, subsidized and rent-regulated housing than any other American city — but our housing crisis never ends. What’s more, the American Dream is not one subsidized rental housing; it’s home-ownership and the wealth it builds.
To get there, we need planning and zoning boards across the state to make it easier for development to move ahead. And for those willing to learn from history, take a look on Long Island — in Levittown. This quintessential American postwar suburb is bestknown for its scale — 17,000 homes on former potato fields on some 40 miles east of Manhattan — and for the fact that developer William Levitt notoriously barred sales to African Americans back in the 1940s.
But there’s a far more positive aspect of Levittown of direct relevance to our current housing supply crisis. As observers from both the right and left are noting, zoning codes that are too strict — mandating large homes on large lots — stand in the way of the construction. “This,” says Eugene Volokh of UCLA Law School, “is an issue on which the Republican white working class and Democratic African-Americans have a common interest.”
Levittown offers a helpful historic model. It was only thanks to a code change, to which the Town of Hempstead reluctantly agreed, that allowed Levittown to proceed at all. Developer Levitt asked the Hempstead Township Zoning Board to allow construction of homes on individual concrete slabs without a cellar.At first, it voted no.
But builder William Levitt did not give up — and the campaign of public pressure he mounted merits appreciation. He organized his potential buyers to attend the next board meeting. War veterans who were crowded into Brooklyn testified in favor of that era’s affordable housing. As Levitt would recall, “The place was jammed every inch. Veterans with their wives and babies overflowed into the streets demanding homes.”
It’s a case study of how to overcome zoning barriers. When those who believe they have something to lose are organized, but the gains of beneficiaries are not clear, Nimby-ism wins out. Levitt understood this — and corrected for it.
The Levittown story reminds us that addressing housing affordability is not a technical problem — it’s a political one. Those who would develop the smaller, denser housing that makes for greater supply and lower prices should be ready to marshal a new generation of potential beneficiaries: local teachers, police, firefighters, those priced out of the town where they grew up. A room full of potential buyers will make it harder to say no.
Levitt not only mounted a brilliant pressure campaign but provided a type of housing that was naturally affordable and whose formula we have forgotten: small homes — 750 square feet! — on small lots.
They were decried as ticky-tacky little boxes — but not by their buyers, who were known to lay down on the concrete slabs of their future home sites and exclaim with joy.
It's also important to take note of what Levitt did not propose: large, multifamily apartment buildings like those of the city prospective buyers were leaving behind. Or public housing that he’d build. His would-be heirs today should discern the limits of the politically possible. It may seem idealistic to believe that every affluent suburb should bear its fair share of subsidized housing — but that’s almost certainly a path to resistance and litigation. As The New York Times wrote a few years back, clearly and without reservation about Connecticut, “Town After Town, Residents are Fighting Affordable Housing.”
Developers need to find the sweet spot to overcome resistance, identifying benefits, not burdens, of more varied types of housing such as townhouses and duplexes, in place of highrises. Rolling back over-exclusive zoning will require the same sort of town-by-town campaigns that were used in the 1920s to adopt zoning in the first place — through persuasion, not shaming.
Levittown today still embodies Levitt’s legacy of affordability. Its median home value, per Census data, is $515,000, far less than the Zillow average of $734,000 for metro New York. Median monthly owner cost is just $1,419, far less than the metro median of $3,148. Also worth noting: today’s Levittown includes African Americans, Hispanics and Asians —all continuing to benefit from William Levitt’s legacy.